Last week, I posted a long (very long) excerpt from Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad's 1985 book on the early history of NBC's Saturday Night Live, which demonstrated just how badly the show went out of its way to embarrass Gerald Ford and his press secretary, Ron Nessen, when Nessen agreed to host a first-season episode of the show. As Rosie Shuster, one of the show's then-writers said, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

In a post today, The Hedgehog Blog writes such thoughts extended far beyond television comedy writers:

It's been interesting to read MSM stories about Gerald Ford, most of which seem, rightly, to emphasize his decency and openness, as well as his great contribution to the country's healing after Richard Nixon and Watergate. It hasn't always been that way, however.

As a young college student I was very politically involved in the 1976 election, and I remember the news media's treatment of President Ford then being simply awful. Then, of course, all we had was CBS, ABC, and NBC, along with the major print outlets. No blogosphere, no talk radio, no Fox News. What they told the public was all the public got.